Book review: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child
It’s the latest in a long line of works from one of America’s greatest living writers. But although there is much to admire, Lucy Scholes is left wanting more.
Toni Morrison’s eleventh novel God Help the Child begins with echoes of the writer’s earliest work. Pecola, the child deemed “ugly” due to the darkness of her skin and raped by her father in The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, is the precursor to the ill-fated baby born on the opening page of her latest book.
“It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong,” recalls the child’s mother Sweetness. “She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black.” Accused of infidelity by her equally light-skinned husband – “what we call high yellow” – who soon after abandons them, Sweetness is left to bring up the child, Lula Ann, by herself, but she’s unable to hide the disgust she feels for the changeling. “Tar is the closest I can think of,” she continues, describing her daughter’s colouring; a reminder of Morrison’s reclamation of the racial slur in the title of her 1981 novel Tar Baby.
By the time Lula Ann grows up her blue-black skin is a blessing, not a curse. “Black sells,” her image savvy friend Jeri tells her. “It’s the hottest commodity in the civilized world. White girls, even brown girls have to strip naked to get that kind of attention.” With a little advice, she’s the master of re-invention – she renames herself Bride; dresses only and always in white, like a “panther in the snow”; and is soon heading up a successful cosmetics company, driving a Jaguar and bringing home a healthy pay cheque each month – but the scars of her childhood neglect are more than skin deep. Finally feeling “safe, colonized somehow,” with her boyfriend Booker, Bride unburdens herself of a secret from her past– but Booker walks out on her. Bride decides to go after him. Whether in an attempt to win him back or to find some kind of closure she seems unsure, but it’s a journey – both literal and metaphorical – that involves the laying of old ghosts to rest for both of them.
No escape
Bride’s expedition has something of the fairy tale about it, the search for Booker taking her deep into a forest within which she inadvertently winds up as the guest of a white hippy couple living a life removed from the trappings of modern life, before eventually following her own version of a breadcrumb trail to the home – a “witch’s den” – of Booker’s aunt. Morrison has always dabbled in magical realism; even if she has been distrustful of the term, fearing it detracts from the politics of her work, these supernatural elements are often central to her stories. Similar tendrils wend their way through God Help the Child, the lightness of the fairy tale motifs offset against an altogether darker enchantment. Immediately after Booker claims she’s not the woman he wants – a phrase that haunts her – Bride begins a “transformation back into a scared little black girl”. Her pubic hair disappears, followed by that under her arms; the pierced holes in her ears close up; her breasts sink back into her chest; her periods stop; and she shrinks to the size of a child. No one else appears to notice these alterations. Whether they are real or simply the product of Bride’s own imagination, it’s impossible to tell; but the symbolism is clear: she can’t escape her past, and she can’t escape her body.
The impact of the past on the present is an enduring theme in Morrison’s work, whether, as in this case, the scars of childhood that have “festered and never scabbed over”, or those of the traumas of black American history. Although God Help the Child lacks the majesty of Morrison’s most powerful works such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved or Song of Solomon, the simple ferocity of her message rings out loud and clear – “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget” – but this doesn’t feel like quite enough. Ultimately her characters remain cipher-like, a ragbag tag-team of narrators, their stories often frustratingly abandoned midway through. At under 200 pages, the excuse could be made that it’s too slight a volume, but Morrison pieces together Booker’s back-story in a single chapter that nestles at the heart of the novel like a smooth, polished pebble, proving that concision is not the issue here. There’s much to admire, but like Bride’s construction of womanhood, one feels it could all come crumbling down at any second.
